Giovanni Battista Piranesi
Fri Jul 09 2010 at 19:36:51
In the 17th century, there were large deserted districts of Rome, built in the time of the Cæsars and still more or less standing; they were largely situated on the outskirts of the city. In those days, you see, Rome was a shadow of its imperial self, a million strong; population crashed beginning in the 2nd century A.D, and had been recovering very slowly: people had been steadily scavenging the old quarters for material with which to build new houses, but there is only so much stone any one house needs, and people mostly took chunks of the Colosseum anyway; the stones are bigger and normally much better than those gotten from the remains of ancient domi, let alone the brick piles of the Aventinerookeries of old. Of course, the insulæ sometimes fell apart even while inhabited, but there were more ruins left of old Rome even in the 18th century than we, perhaps, might think.
How to see London through Samuel Pepys’s eyes
With Jacky Colliss Harvey s book Walking Pepys s London, you can imitate the great diarist – just don’t beat up your pet monkey
Detail of John Closterman s portrait of Samuel Pepys (c1695)
Credit: Alamy
The greatest moments in reading, as Alan Bennett reminds us, are those when “you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things” that seems so immediate and personal it is “as if a hand has come out and taken yours”. As those who have had the pleasure of reading Samuel Pepys’s diary will know, the hand that emerges from it does not do so gently, as Bennett imagines, but rather grabs yours forcefully, slops beer on the table, then slaps you hard about the face. And the less said about where that hand might have been earlier in the day, the better. Just count yourself fortunate that the man himself does not emerge bodily from the pages, to “s - in the chimney twice” and then proceed merrily
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and Network International Holdings Plc (LSE: NETW) (the Company ), the leading enabler of digital commerce across the Middle East and Africa (MEA), announces that further to the release of the Company s preliminary results announcement on 8 March 2021, the Annual Report and Accounts for the year ended 31 December 2020 ( 2020 Annual Report ) has been published today and is available on the Company s website at https://investors.networkinternational.ae/. It has also been submitted to the National Storage Mechanism and will shortly be available at https://data.fca.org.uk/#/nsm/nationalstoragemechanism . The appendix to this announcement contains additional information which has been extracted from the 2020 Annual Report for the purposes of compliance with the FCA s Disclosure & Transparency Rules and should be read together with the Company s preliminary results announcement, which can be found at